Modern IT is becoming ever more saturated with acronyms and abbreviations. Learning about a new product or service can easily become over complicated by the sheer volume of acronyms used within the space of even a small document. The current approach with most documents is to either accept the acronym at face value, or spend time researching each acronym separately through an external medium such as an Internet search engine. This can be problematic, as accepting an acronym at face value can detract from the true significance of the acronym. Likewise, externally researching acronyms can be slow and disruptive. Some annotation technologies already exist and are referred to below.
Contextual advertising, originally put forward by Google™, works by allowing advertising context or hyperlinks to be inserted into a webpage. The author enables this feature by adding a JavaScript™ line to the top of the document. The JavaScript analyses the document for keywords and retrieves suitable advert links. The JavaScript then sets separate advertisement spaces or modifies the found keywords into hyperlinks. This gives the idea of augmenting a page for keywords. It is a manual process that requires the author to input the JavaScript on a per page basis. This also implies that the modifications are permanent and cannot be removed. (Google is a trademark of Google Inc. JavaScript is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.)
A “whatis bot” is a Lotus™ Sametime™ automated response script (also known as a bot) that sits over an acronym database. This bot can be queried as in a normal Sametime conversation, and will retrieve the query from its acronym database, returning possible definitions of acronyms in the real time chat window. This proves relatively convenient, but requires the user to break away from the document, to independently query the bot. Lotus and Sametime are registered trademarks of IBM Corporation in the US and other countries.
Extension toolbars in browsers such as Internet Explorer™ and Firefox™ offer toolbar plug-ins which provide extra services, including manipulation of website rendering which could be used for annotation. However the manipulation of the rendering is currently only used for simple parsing; such as adding adverts or blocking pop-ups. More useful and complicated functions such as language translation and page annotation have yet to prove popular. Given the comparative complexity and issues around maintenance and upgrading, it makes more sense to centralize the functionality of the service, rather than building it into every browser. (Internet Explorer is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Firefox is a trademark of the Mozilla Foundation.)
There is a need for a resource that can transparently annotate a document using the context of the document as guidance in selecting the annotation.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,651,058 discloses a system and method of automatic discovery of terms in a document that are relevant to a given target topic. This patent publication discloses a method and system for automatic mining of text to discover terms that are relevant to a target term. The system comprises a new terms discoverer, a candidate terms discoverer, and a relevant terms discoverer. The new terms discoverer identifies new terms like books, names, acronyms etc by automatically mining patterns using knowledge rules and identifying relationships using statistical modules. Thereafter, the candidate terms discoverer performs statistical analysis based on the occurrence frequency of the terms within the document to identify potentially relevant terms from the terms identified by the new terms discoverer. The candidate discoverer further includes a database for storing relevant terms in conjunction with the terms identified by the new terms discoverer. Further, the relevant terms discoverer identifies relevant terms by applying the association rules to potentially relevant terms identified by the candidate terms discoverer to refine a relevance of the potentially relevant terms by eliminating false relevant terms. The system utilizes duality concept especially in the case of finding related pairs like acronyms and their expansions arises, by continually iteratively refining pairs of terms that are related.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,966,030 discloses a method, system and computer program product for implementing acronym assistance. The patent publication discloses a method and system for implementing acronym assistance for a user of a text document or browser program. Acronyms in the text document are identified and predetermined number of words around the acronyms is scanned to identify the definition of the acronym. Upon identifying the definition of the acronym, the system automatically displays it to user. Further, if definition is not found in the proximity of the acronym in the document, the system refers to an acronym dictionary to identify definition of the acronym. User selected options are provided for displaying the definition of the acronym to the user. The definition of the acronym can be provided in-line in the document text or presented as a footnote definition with a reference to an original acronym definition.
Whilst both these patent publications are relevant to annotating acronyms in a single document context they do not address the issue of acronyms with multiple meanings or of different contexts within a document. Nor do they address the issue of different context for a single acronym.